Neil C Smith
Although Neil bills himself as the “lead developer”, it turns out that so far he has been the sole developer for this project, which presents a rather mind-boggling array of ways to manipulate displays, which he has used for presentations with public interaction, as just one of its applications. It’s also continuously manipulable in real-time, so that parameters and inputs can be added, deleted, and modified as the show goes on.
Pat David
Coming out of a history of frustration trying to find high-quality tutorials and information about photographic image manipulation software, such as Gimp, Pat decided to start his own site, which he pronounces “pixels-dot-us”, as a repository of good information for photographers using open source imaging software. From the beginnings of writing all the content himself, he has attracted a number of contributors and even some other photography-related sites have combined with his to enrich the information there. There is a separate but connected site which serves as a forum for discussion of various issues.
Ferrero Andrea
Ferrero gave us an introduction to his project, Photoflow, designed for complex nondestructive manipulation of RAW images. He uses the VIPS libraries, so that serial and potentially complex manipulations can occur in real time. It also includes the ability to create process layers, not typically available in other open source image editors. There is also a Photoflow plug-in for Gimp in development. His perspective as a photographer has been a great impetus to its expanding features.
John Cupitt
John gave us an introduction to VIPS, a C++ based set of libraries for handling VERY large data sets related to imaging. An art museum might be interested in this for high resolution images using visible light data, infrared, or ultraviolet data, then processing all of this in some way. There are also medical imaging applications for handling large collections of images for further processing and analysis. In addition, this is of interest to archaeologists, who might take complex sets of images from a site to be analyzed later. The key to VIPS is its low requirements for hardware capabilities.
Athanasios Velios, Sebastian Faubel, and Moritz Ebril
A subject of interest in particular to art historians, but also artists themselves, is understanding the process by which some particular artwork was created. With so much art and design now done using computers, Artivity is a tool for creating a documentation of the steps that an artist has gone through in the creation of some final work. This includes not only what editing steps might have been used, but also what sorts of materials were accessed by the artist in making the work. One ends up with a rich collection of material for future analysis, for others and the artists, who might be surprised at the information in retrospect.
Dennis De Bel
Steganography has to do with hiding/embedding some image inside another. Dennis, taking the perspective of a subversive (and humorous) approach to this, demonstrated how one might clandestinely hide the information about some controversial object, like a 3D printer model of a gun, inside the data of some other file. What’s more, one might also construct a 3D model which hides the controversial object physically inside some more benign object, like a teapot.
Mark Meagher and Phil Langley
Following up on Yorik’s presentation, we see in topoBIM the development of a tool extending the capabilities of BIM to some graphical analytical methods to look at the ways that some future structure will be used, including the people flow and the workflow within. This information would then be used to guide the actual design to promote natural flow of people and work so that related rooms and areas easily communicate with one another.
Yorik Van Havre
This was a nice historical presentation of the progress in architectural representations from the point of view of architects, starting with plans drawn on paper, to 2D plans created digitally, then progressing to Building Information Modeling. BIM has to do not only with creating drawings which might be used for construction, but also with creating 3D representations of the exterior and interior of buildings, as well as a large amount of information about various construction materials and methods to be used. Yorik is involved with the continued development of aspects of FreeCAD which would be of use to architects, using open formats for saving the work.
Presentation by Ashley Smith, John Perez and Alice Pugini
We met the student designers who helped create the various graphic elements: the logos, the web pages, the T-shirt and other design. They are as a whole supportive of this new experience with Libre Graphic tools, but had insights into some limitations.
Presentation by Christoph Haag
A presentation of some details about a simple custom markdown language Christoph has made to allow one a purely command line approach to go from text file input to finished PDF, as for making a book from text and images.